Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Where are the HRO Successes?

Because much of my practice focuses on helping companies and HRO providers improve the outsourcing relationship for cost, quality and service levels, in my job I see many broken HRO relationships. It’s the nature of the business. So it comes as no surprise to see the article published online at Workforce.com yesterday: ACS, Delta Change Terms of $120 Million HRO Agreement.

In addition to eliminating recruiting, absence management and employee travel call center support, ACS will have to make two separate cash payment to Delta totaling $7.7 million “in settlement of certain disputes regarding Affiliated’s performance of the services.”
Invariably, many of the service related problems experienced by the top tier providers track back to problems with initial setup, implementation, governance structure, misalignment of expectations or ambiguity of responsibility in the retained organization. I’ve seen the problems and helped fix them.

Today, I’d like to put the call out to hear from practitioners out there who have seen it done right from the beginning. Either e-mail me your experience, or post it here.

We see so much advice provided on Blogs and in industry publications on how to implement correctly, it begs the questions “is it ever done just right”, and “out of all the advice given, is there one or a set common success factors observable in real life experience.”
I’d love to highlight true success in this space. The fact is it’s much easier to talk about the HRO failures being experienced. Yes, we learn from failure, but let’s learn from success also.
I hope to hear from you!

About the author – Donald Glade is President and Founder of Sourcing Analytics, Inc., an independent consulting firm specializing in helping companies optimize their HR / benefits / payroll service partnerships through relationship management, financial analysis, and process improvement.